Polymath, visionary and indefatigable change agent. Founder of Polymathica, a global community of intellectual sophistication, The Polymathic Institute, which promotes polymathic research, education, careers and lifestyles, The Polymath, a weekly PDF magazine of erudite analysis and commentary. Pages describe my original work.

About Me

My name is Michael Wells Ferguson. I was born on March 29, 1950 in Minneapolis Minnesota. I lived there until October 2010 when I relocated to Miami, FL. I am married to Nadezhda Pavlovna Ferguson (nee Azanova), the most wonderful, sexy, intelligent, funny and loving woman on the planet (Ferguson, 2001). I have three children by previous marriage and Nadezhda has one by previous marriage. I have eight grandchildren, so far.I spent the majority of my career in various professional, management and consultative roles in the fields of Accounting, Financial Analysis and Strategic Planning. However, I have also been compensated in the capacities of waiter, taxi cab driver, quality control inspector for the Lunar Excursion Module, professional game inventor, musician, tutor and writer.However, I consider the traditional CV to be more misleading than elucidative. Am I formally educated? Some. However, I am dispositionally an autodidact. To be honest, most university classes actually anger me with their snail's pace. My natural reaction is to say, 'Just give me the book and then I will take the final exam. If I have questions, I will ask.' Simply put, if I can learn Accounting in one night, why should I drag it out over the course of a year? Furthermore, Universities do not teach in the question first Polymathic Method. So, for the simple sake of efficiency, I have become an autodidact and have, as much as possible, eschewed formal education.Which brings
me to what is important 'about me.' I have Compulsive Learning Disorder (CLD), a
malady I have personally described in an effort to understand myself. I ought to write it up and publish
it in The Polymath. Wait, there is no such journal. Well, we, the Founding Members of the Polymathic Institute and the Culture of Affluence, Polymathica, will create the infrastructures, such as the peer reviewed journal, The Polymath, that should, but do not exist.

Compulsive Learning Disorder is a condition where
one's curiosity and thirst for knowledge interferes
with one's life. I would argue that it is not truly a psychopathy, but
rather is simply a trait that is incompatible with the contemporary social, economic and
cultural milieu. But that is for another day.I
refer to myself as a Polymath, though I redefine the term, from a person with extraordinary breadth and depth of knowledge, to someone who asks questions and then finds the
answer without respect for subject boundaries. Take for example the
following question. All mammals have hair that stops growing at the
length that is evolutionarily adaptive for them. Human hair if not cut
will grow down to or past our derriere. Why? To what are we
evolutionarily adapting? Now that is generally taken to be a question
in Evolutionary Biology. I, as a Polymath, see no benefit in naming it
and bounding the question. In other words, if I wander into Physics,
Psychology, Mathematics, etc., as I do, in an effort to find the answer, well
then, so be it. That is where it took me.If
you prosecute your life in this manner and you have CLD, by midlife you
will know a whole lot about a whole lot of things. You will have
become not just dispositionally a Polymath, but also one in depth and
breadth of learning. I, on average, read about 300 pages of graduate texts, peer reviewed papers and government white papers per week and I have done so for the past 40 years. Actually,
that is not intended to be a quantitatively accurate statement. I've
probably read more than that. So, I
am an autodidactic polymath. I guess. However, that is obviously, only one aspect of me. It is probably the most relevant to my readers, but not to me. I would be most inclined to define myself as pleasant, refined and scrupulously ethical. I am about 6'2" and 195#. I am physically unusual with many physical traits well outside of the norm. For example, my upper body is XXL and my lower body is M. Funny looking in my opinion. My estimated cranial capacity is 2,007 cc (male mean is 1,406). My usual body temperature is about 2°F below the mean for humans. My lung capacity is above +3σ and my heart rate is naturally over 90 bpm, even when I was a long distance runner. There are other oddities, but I will leave it at that. Nadezhda and I live in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida and Minsk, Belarus.

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Michael W. Ferguson

Polymath, visionary and change agent

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The Polymath is the official publication of Polymathica, a global community of refinement and erudition, and The Polymathic Institute, which promotes polymathic research, education, careers and lifestyles. It also promotes projects designed to be remediation for the Inappropriately Excluded.

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Remediation Resources

Experiment.com will be a useful tool in our goal of remediation for Polymaths and the inappropriately excluded. While this site provides a good format for funding independent research, it is not going to provide an adequate supply of funders. However, by utilizing our contacts in Polymathica we can move forward in the Polymathic Institute's goal to promote polymathic research and secondarily, polymathic careers.

Fundable.com for many this will be the best crowdfunding platform for equity offerings. Their charge is $179 per month. Of course, the payment processing fee of 3.2% to 3.7% is extra. Still, a three month, $500,000 offering will only have a total cost of around $18,000 to $20,000 far below the 9% to 10% of most platforms. Of course, like all equity funding sites, you will need to bring most of the investors yourself. That is where P.E.N. comes in.

My Quotes

From time to time I post something that deserves more than ephemeral exposure. When that happens, I post it here.

Career Advice

You can't earn a living telling people how things are or how they will be. You earn a living by feeding their confirmation bias. That is not a career to which one should aspire.

On Fools

I really have attempted to abide by the apostolic admonition to suffer fools gladly. However, in the end, there were just too many of them.

On Being Human

I was asked, 'In what way does human intellect differ from other animals in kind and not just in degree?' I answered, 'Only humans can ask that question.'

On Opinions

Those who say, 'That's just my opinion' rarely mean it. Those who say, 'That's just your opinion' almost always do.

IQ in Perspective

A guy once quoted to me, 'When a wise man points at a star the fool looks at his finger.'
I replied, 'True. But so does my dog and I love her dearly.
Let's not overly weigh intelligence in our assessments of worth.'

The First Principle of Information Age Political Philosophy

No person should be required to live under a body of laws, programs and policies that they consider to be fundamentally unjust.

How Markets Really Work

Perception is reality...until reality steps in and says, 'OK, enough!!!'

On the Mainstream News

Pitting a Left Wing lunatic against a Right Wing lunatic gets you a whole lot of pyrotechnics but absolutely no useful insights. You can't average them and find yourself in a defensible middle.

Knowing the Future

There has been no time in the last 200 years when the world thirty years hence was generally believable. Therefore, if someone tells you what the world will be like in thirty years and it seems reasonable, history says that they are wrong.

Make a Difference

I am interested in what you have done, what you are doing and what you will do. I am supremely indifferent to what you could do, but won't. Consequently, I don't care very much about your IQ.